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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26771206">To Love And Be Loved To Return</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotQuiteInsane/pseuds/ChaosMidge'>ChaosMidge (NotQuiteInsane)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst, Cleric Magic, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Death, Feelings, Happy Ending?, Heavy Angst, Love, M/M, Magic, Necromancy, Necrophilia, Oral Sex, Rape/Non-con Elements, Sex Magic</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 03:53:30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,951</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26771206</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotQuiteInsane/pseuds/ChaosMidge</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Zolf has lost a lot of people.</p><p>Especially now, in the throes of war with the blue veined things that were once human, he imagines that loss is inevitable. He and Wilde have raised glasses to it often enough. They don't talk about the people they've lost. What good would it do them other than renew the wounds inflicted so deeply Zolf thinks it might tear him apart?</p><p>Objectively, Zolf knows that it's unhealthy, but he threw those clerical teachings to the wind long ago. He doesn't need to be healthy. He just needs to be functional. A sound body will get him just as far as a sound mind and working magic.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Zolf Smith/Oscar Wilde</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>31</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>To Love And Be Loved To Return</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Zolf has lost a lot of people.</p><p>He supposes that it started with Feryn, all those years ago. He lost friends in his time in the navy. He lost crewmates in his time with the pirates. Back on land he lost the closest thing he'd had to family in a long time.</p><p>He still regrets leaving Sasha behind.</p><p>Especially now, in the throes of war with the blue veined things that were once human, he imagines that loss is inevitable. He and Wilde have raised glasses to it often enough. They don't talk about the people they've lost. What good would it do them other than renew the wounds inflicted so deeply Zolf thinks it might tear him apart?</p><p>Objectively, Zolf knows that it's unhealthy, but he threw those clerical teachings to the wind long ago. He doesn't need to be healthy. He just needs to be functional. A sound body will get him just as far as a sound mind and working magic.</p><p>It doesn't stop him from wrecking his body, though. Bodies heal, after all, especially with as much magic as he has at his disposal now. Zolf is growing into his own as a Cleric. Aside from the occasional problem at sea, Poseidon is long gone from his thoughts. He's worked too hard to fix the problems put before him, to fix the blue veins, to fix the world. A <em>god</em> is the least of his concerns. As long as he keeps his mind toward the future instead of lingering on the past, as long as he can <em>hope</em>...</p><p>When the water legs disintegrate and he's left with two stumps, feeling as useless as he'd been in Paris with the party, it's Wilde who goes out on his own and has the Mr. Ceiling legs retrofitted to work for a normal prosthetic. Zolf doesn't know how to thank him, so he doesn't. He doesn't think about how he just wants to pull Wilde down to his level and kiss him, how he couldn't possibly deserve anyone as good as this.</p><p>But it gives him more hope than he thinks he possibly could have had on his own. It gives him the courage and the capacity to take a step forward and out of the mire of his own religious crisis, into the dawn of a new day. Because the world may be fucked, but Zolf can fight and that gives him hope.</p><p>Wilde toasts to that when Zolf tells him over pints one evening.</p><p>They've just lost another friend. A paladin of Athena who had been working with them to uncover intelligence on the Hephaestus lot. The kill switch plans that had disappeared when the party left Damascus for Rome were in the wind and it was only with the assistance of those who seek knowledge above all that they had any hope of finding it.</p><p>But they were ambushed. Alinore fell. She took a sword to the spine and not even Zolf's fastest magic could have saved her. Wilde had still had to drag him away, kicking and screaming her name.</p><p>And so they drink.</p><p>That night is the first time that Zolf tries to kiss Wilde. They're leaning toward one another, heads close as they ignore everyone else around them and joking about some inconsequential thing—an old fling of Wilde's or that stupid article about Bertie, Zolf can't remember. And Zolf closes the distance. </p><p>Wilde, more out of surprise and instinct than anything, responds.</p><p>A few seconds later, he pushes Zolf away with rough haste and leaves the bar.</p><p>They don't talk about it the next day as they set off for Munich.</p><p>But they lose another friend some weeks later. Their guide, Ishmael, a ranger who had been leading them the long way around the closed border into France. He had been funny, doing tricks with the pine marten that followed him everywhere. Quick to smile, quicker to laugh—always with a startled surprise that made Zolf think he wasn't used to mirth—and quick to throw a dirty joke back at a flustered dwarf.</p><p>Not quick enough to avoid a poisoned dagger in the small of the back.</p><p>And so they drink.</p><p>The trick to illusion magic, Wilde says as they're well into their cups, is that you have to believe in it yourself. Making yourself believe the unbelievable. Weaving the song <em>just so</em> and passing your belief onward into the spell. A bit like what Zolf does with his hope and his gruff certainty, he says with a quirked smile.</p><p>And Zolf finds himself falling into that smile. Dwarven constitution only gets him so far, sometimes, he thinks dizzily as he finds himself in Wilde's arms. Wilde is warm, he's firm, he's a little too gentle than Zolf can handle in that moment.</p><p>Instead of thinking, Zolf feels and he kisses Wilde again, pointedly ignoring the slow-to-surface memory of what had happened last time.</p><p>Maybe something has changed. Maybe Wilde just doesn't have the strength of will to resist anymore, but he kisses back. They fall into bed and they lose themselves in each other—such a different kind of loss than they've been used to recently. Zolf caresses the scar on Wilde's cheek and calls him Oscar and Wilde closes his eyes, tips his pelvis into the rocking rolling of their hips and cries a little when he comes.</p><p>Soon after that, the quarantine procedures are put in place.</p><p>Wilde goes quiet and stony during quarantine, refuses to acknowledge Zolf, refuses to look at him the way he always does when they're together, when they're held in each others' embraces, when they still can't smile at one another because they know that part of what brings them together so closely is loss and fear of loss.</p><p>The hours after quarantine ends is always a blur, a frantic tangle of limbs, of whispered apologies, of forgiveness and promises they know they can't keep—</p><p>The unthinkable happens.</p><p>It hasn't been so long since Poseidon abandoned him, but Zolf can feel the rawness of his new power in his chest, in his heart, in his core. Where Poseidon's power was a trickle at best, this new Hope of his is a flood, a garden in full spring bloom, a blazing sun. He knows that he can heal. He knows that he can protect. He knows that he can—</p><p>He can do so much.</p><p>But he can only do so much when it is <em>his</em> explosion of untested, uncontrollable magic that mows down the crowd of blue-veined things that come upon them on the road. Zolf is reeling from the bang, ears ringing, equilibrium blown to pieces. He turns to make sure that Wilde is okay, that Wilde didn't come into contact with one of the blue-veins and—</p><p>Zolf has so much healing at his disposal and he has so many words that should rip the air asunder with their power as they twist and bind and hope the world into the way he wishes.</p><p>But Wilde is growing cold in his arms and no matter how loudly he screams, no matter how much positive energy he channels and how many plants and flowers spring into green all around him, across the barren winter dusted ground, how many buds burst open in the trees around him, how the sounds of birds and animals suddenly explode around them—</p><p>Wilde lays there in his arms. Corpse pale. Limp. Heavy. </p><p>Dead.</p><p>Zolf stays there for a long time, knees on the cold hard ground, barely feeling the icy chill sink into him. Barely feeling how his body heat leeches into the corpse in his arms. Heaviest body he's ever carried. Weighed down by the gravity of loss and feeling and—</p><p>He can't do this again.</p><p>Gently, oh so gently he lays the corpse on the ground. He closes its eyes. He closes his own eyes and takes a few deep breaths—they sting his nose and his eyes, even if his eyes have nothing to do with the cold air. It must be the breathing. </p><p>They're outside a city with a large temple complex.</p><p>He walks into the temple of Athena like he belongs there. Anyone who thinks that he shouldn't be there is quickly turned away by the holy air he carries. This is a man who has channeled more god recently than any of them put together—except perhaps the high priest. And then only by a small margin.</p><p>Zolf enters the library and goes straight to necromancy. Necromancy is not forbidden. It is an area of study like any other. Last Rites are necromancy. Some believe that branches of healing are necromancy. Those are the ones he hopes to find.</p><p>He finds... something. He's heard about it before, though not in so much detail as he finds in this temple to Athena, goddess of knowledge, of warriors, of justice—though not the same justice as Poseidon.</p><p>It's almost laughable that he finds it here and not in an Aphrodite temple. He thinks the latter would be more appropriate, really. Spell requirements: Verbal. Material. Somatic. </p><p>Verbal: The cries of one who has loved and is loved in return.</p><p>Material: The body of the one that they loved and were loved by in return.</p><p>Somatic: What would have, under any other circumstances, be called a desecration of the corpse, the ultimate disrespect to any body—if only the previous two requirements had not been filled. To touch the body as if in the throes of passion and to make the body remember the love, the life, the passion it once held. </p><p>Soma.</p><p>Somnus.</p><p>The Greek root for "body" and the Latin "sleep" are remarkably close, Zolf thinks as he closes the book full of secrets. It's strange and he's not sure if he likes the comparison. He's not sure he likes the connotations that a dead body could just... wake. He's not sure if he's ever thought about the god of the dead <em>not</em> being...</p><p>He takes the book. No one stops him. He thinks that the priests and clerics and paladins of Athena are unnerved by the look in his eyes and the purpose in his gait. (He doesn't think about the blood covering his clothes, clotted in his beard, flaking from his skin.) He's seen paladins with this look in their eyes before, but never a cleric. He's not sure if this is what it's like to be a paladin. To be this singular in purpose. But he thinks he understands a bit of it. A bit of that drive to believe and follow the word of a God. Poseidon was never his God. Poseidon could never have carried his faith-turned-conduit for unearthly power. No, something else has him in its grip in those moments as he strides from Athena's temple.</p><p>Hope.</p><p>Hope that he can bring back the one thing in this world that means more to him than any other.</p><p>Hope that he can bring back the one that he—</p><p>Verbal. Material. Somatic.</p><p>Can he fulfill the terms of that magical contract?</p><p>Does Zolf love Wilde?</p><p>Yes. He does. More than he thinks he's loved anything else.</p><p>Does—Did Wilde love him in return?</p><p>Zolf thinks back to the triumphant set of Wilde's shoulders when he'd brought back the mechanical legs, how the curve of his smile had turned wicked as he set the legs before Zolf and grabbed the back of his neck, how he'd kissed him then, how they'd lain together later that night, soaked in sweat and exhausted and laughing.</p><p>Yes. Yes, he thinks that Wilde loved—</p><p>Zolf walks faster.</p><p>By the time he reaches the corpse, it has cooled fully. The remains of the things that had attacked them have smoldered to nothing in the open field. Stars are only just beginning to twinkle in the sky above. The Milky Way won't be visible for another few hours and maybe not even then with their—his—proximity to the city. Too much light. It's easier at sea. It's easier in the middle of nowhere. It's easier away from everyone and everything and anything he could care about and he...</p><p>He finds the corpse.</p><p>It's... it's hard to look. It's...</p><p>Zolf has seen dead bodies before. He dragged his brother Feryn out of the mine after he killed him. He'd seen the bodies of their dead parents. He'd pulled bodies out of the water. He'd <em>killed</em> people. Been the one to pull the lives from their bodies with sword and trident and magic.</p><p>Wilde...</p><p>The body on the bent chaff in front of him. It feels different.</p><p>Zolf closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. It's cold, the approaching winter dragging talons through his lungs.</p><p>The cold of the air is entirely separate from the cold in front of him. Cold. Cold and unmoving. Unfeeling. Unresponsive.</p><p>(Zolf can remember every sly smile, every sidelong glance, every flirting comment. The motionless <em>thing</em> in front of him isn't Wilde and he knows that he can't think about it as <em>not</em> Wilde, as not <em>Oscar</em> or this isn't going to work. Material component: the body of the one that they love and are loved by in return. He <em>has</em> to think of the corpse as Wilde or this isn't going to work and that's too much, he can't—)</p><p>Cold. Why is it so cold?</p><p>Why does his magic feel so far away?</p><p>Zolf crosses his legs, knees just barely touching the corpse, the body, the—Wilde. Knees barely touching Wilde.</p><p>He meditates.</p><p>The seconds pass. The minutes pass. Hours pass.</p><p>They feel like seconds.</p><p>He breathes.</p><p>Zolf opens his eyes and looks down.</p><p>He begins to undress Wilde's body. As difficult as the maneuvering is, his limbs stiff and his body uncooperative, Zolf refuses to cut the fabric from his body. It's the last thing that Wilde would have wanted. He knows that. Wilde would never have forgiven him for ruining his suit.</p><p>He deals with the awkward maneuvering.</p><p>The waistcoat, then the shirt, then the trousers, then the pants.</p><p>Before him, Wilde lays naked and cold. Cold and unmoving. Unresponsive. In life, he would never have let himself be seen like this, bare of all pretense, expression slack and unguarded. But even though it feels wrong, Zolf can't help but see beauty in the lines of his face and body. In life those lines had been coy, reactive, full of that spark which was so undeniably <em>Wilde</em>. Now they lay still, wax-like, a caricature of what they had been.</p><p>Zolf closes his eyes to the lie before him and bends down, as he has so many times before, pressing his lips to Wilde's. He ignores the chill, unyielding flesh and remembers every time that Wilde has gasped against him. He remembers the heated moments, the fevered whispers, the breathless benedictions. He remembers the way Wilde keened beneath him with a particularly good thrust and squeezes his eyes shut against the memory, against the pinprick of tears, against the sting of loss.</p><p>Wilde is in his arms and Zolf has hope that he will be for a long time coming.</p><p>He leaves Wilde's lips and ghosts his mouth along the angle of the jaw, down to his neck where no pulse flutters beneath the skin. Where memory tells him there should be gasps and moans and instead there is only silence.</p><p>He moves on.</p><p>The chest, the—unbeating, cold, unflushed skin—expanse of flesh across which he runs his hands is so familiar. The dusting of hair that leads down past his navel—smeared with blood from the shrapnel wound in his side, ripped apart by an explosion made by <em>his</em> magic—to near that place at the hollow of his hip where Zolf always left feather light kisses and Wilde always choked back a giggle, a plea to stop teasing.</p><p>But now there is no laughter, no whispered jokes. Only silence. Only autumn chill.</p><p>Zolf takes Wilde's limp cock into his mouth, holding his hips firmly. If a heartbeat had still pulsed below the surface, Zolf knows with intimate familiarity the bruises that would have blossomed beneath his fingertips. He had reveled before in the marks that rose across pale flesh like badges of pride and remembrance. Now the blood does anything but rise.</p><p>Wilde's cock stays flaccid in his mouth. Unresponsive. The only warmth is that which Zolf's mouth gives it.</p><p>It's enough to pretend.</p><p>Zolf lets his nails scrape lightly down Wilde's thighs, twin lines of white-then-red <em>should</em> rise to the surface. Only the white of disturbed skin appears, but he isn't looking, too engrossed in what he's doing. Zolf pushes his hands to the inside of Wilde's thighs and pushes, giving himself more room to fondle his balls and breathe in puffs of vapor—visible in the late autumn air—over the white expanse of skin. </p><p>He can remember how warm Wilde always was in bed, how welcoming he was once the initial barriers were overcome. Zolf can never forget the first time he fell asleep on accident and awoke the next morning to find Wilde's arm and leg thrown over him, skin sticky with warmth and comfort and—</p><p>But Wilde is cold now and Zolf has to ignore it or this isn't going to work.</p><p>Zolf puts a blood slick finger against Wilde's hole and presses in, such a familiar feeling, but tinged with nothing he can express, nothing he wants to express. He presses kisses into the arch of Wilde's hip and imagines how blood would well to the surface, how the hickeys would spring lovely and pink then red then purple. He imagines how over time they would dull to yellow-green then be gone and Wilde would whisper filthy things into his ear at the back of a bar, would ask for more marks the next time they fell together as they always did.</p><p>When Wilde is open enough that Zolf can easily fit three fingers in a body only capable of relaxing around him, he takes a deep breath. He thinks of Wilde's coy grin, thinks of the little gasps he always lets out when Zolf takes his time, when Zolf puts his wicked tongue to use. He thinks of the way he can make Wilde shake and gasp, of the little tremors that overwhelm his body when he's getting close to the edge.</p><p>The wound on Wilde's side is—Zolf refuses to call it a blessing when he digs his fingers in, seeking something to make this less unpleasant than it's already going to be. The small bit of blood he manages to spread across his fingers feels icy in the evening air. He spits on his hand, too, as much as he can manage, and slicks himself up.</p><p>Zolf remembers the first time they did this, remembers the searing kiss, the way Wilde bit his lip and let out a hyena laugh when Zolf asked if he was ready.</p><p>He presses into Wilde's body and almost sobs when the tiny bit of warmth that's left inside greets him. Slowly, he fucks in and remembers the words of the spell, remembers the tingle of magic, and the flood of Hope that had been introduced to his heart when he found the book. The book that is now laying cast aside in the field beside them. The silver foil on its edges glows faintly as he whispers his words, as he sheathes himself fully in the tepid flesh of his lover.</p><p>The words are a shudder on the air, reminiscent of every time they've done this before. The magic is a song woven from memory and flesh, so close to the songs that Wilde believed in so much that they warped the world to his will. The song is a melody of life and death and love and loss. It wraps them both in ecstasy and fear and longing and a <em>hope</em> so beautiful that Zolf forgets, for the first time, what exactly he's doing and just <em>wants</em>. He chants or sings or intones the words, he can't keep track anymore, and the magic twines them together and he remembers.</p><p>Verbal: the cries of one who has loved and is loved in return</p><p>Material: The body of the one that they have loved and were loved by in return.</p><p>Somatic: To touch the body as if in the throes of passion and to make the body remember the love, the life, the passion it once held.</p><p>Zolf's tears fall upon Wilde's chest and run pinkened rivulets down the curve of his ribcage. His thrusts move Wilde's body fractionally and he feels every second like a thousand years. A thousand years of love and loss and this <em>will</em> work, he will <em>make</em> it work. He hopes and his magic gushes forward, bolsters his love and his loss and his passion and his pleasure. The world around them shines with light tinged blue, then teal, then green, then bright and yellow as the sun and the <em>warmth</em> is incredible.</p><p>And Zolf weeps. He weeps as he curls over Wilde's corpse and fucks in, desperate, decimated by this—his fault, his fault, his <em>fault</em>—and he remembers...</p><p>He remembers Wilde holding him not two nights ago, remembers what he had been almost too asleep to hear as they drifted off in each other's arms. He remembers closing his eyes tighter because if he was dreaming, he didn't want to wake and find this moment to be false. He remembers...</p><p>"I love you, Zolf Smith."</p><p>Zolf comes with a low groan into Wilde's tight, warm body and he weeps.</p><p>"I love you, Oscar Wilde,” he whispers, a plea clear in his wrecked voice. “I love you so much I would fix the world for you. I would break myself to pieces and I would put them back together for the hope of one more day with you. Oscar—Oscar, I love you so much. Come back to me."</p><p>(Unseen by Zolf, the book laying next to them blackens, then crumbles away to dust. A small gust of wind scatters the remnants.)</p><p>But this is unimportant. Because in that moment, a rattling breath shudders through Wilde's body.</p><p>Zolf yells and channels as much positive energy as he has left. He dips into his innermost reserves and <em>hopes</em> and before him, the wounds on Wilde's chest knit together, muscle and gristle and fat and flesh surging forth to <em>heal</em>.</p><p>Wilde lurches forward and his naked arms wrap around Zolf's shoulders, locking him in a vice grip and—</p><p>Zolf is still crying. His tears should have long dried up, but he can't—he doesn't—it <em>worked</em> and he—</p><p>Wilde is shivering against him, clearly freezing in the open air. But the breaths against Zolf's neck are warm and he can feel a steady pulse against his chest and there are so many things he wants to say, but all that rips from him are desperate sobs of relief. Wilde is alive, he's okay, he's going to be okay. He's <em>alive</em> and Zolf can't stop the tears of relief, he can't.</p><p>Zolf kisses Wilde's neck, his cheek, his lips, and pauses at his forehead as he slowly pulls himself out of—it's not a corpse anymore, it's <em>not</em>—and holds Wilde for all he's worth.</p><p>"You're safe," he whispers. "You're here. You're alive. I love you so much, Oscar Wilde."</p><p>Zolf feels tears that do not belong to him splash against his shoulder. And in his ear, a whisper he struggles to catch, so barely there that he could have imagined them.</p><p>"I love you too, Zolf Smith. I love you too."</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you so much to flammenkobold for the prompt and to skvader for the beta. When In Rome discord server, y'all are the best support and friends, ilyasfm. ;w;<br/>(Sinaesthete, this is tangentially your fault. Thank you too.)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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